Well, finally got a chance to ready the summary paper the state put out on the subject.

Honestly, there is little there than is really damning for the project. Smolt residualization issues are likely not a factor: percentage is higher than typical hatchery fish, but not not huge and they believe that is in part due to the genetics of the fish saying stay a second year since the many of the wild fish do on their own. Parker and I disagree on this one ... since most of these go out quick, at a time when there is more food in that river than they all know what to do with, not an issue. And for holdovers, there appears to be no negligible effect on the wild stock since some of the biggest wild returns on record were in years where heavy Snider plants also returned, so had there been too much competition, one would expect lower wild returns and that has NOT been the case.

And if all interested parties are worried about 50K steelhead smolts, then what about the 3/4 million salmon smolts dumped in there. Rather see some of those cut back than these fish

The HSRG metric goals are far exceeded, so all is in order there.

Size not great, but honestly, I'm not sold that's a big issue either way since returns don't seem to reflect outgoing size. But if the state wants us to fatten them up some more, there are ways to do that, warm the Pond up a few degrees and feed em more and then you can meet that magical guideline for whatever it's worth.

The Gene bank ideas laid out in the summary are great and I'd love to see the situation where this took place without 5 days a week of netting and a current slaughter-fest of outgoing kelts like is occurring now.

The biggest problem if they want to go that route is the state is fooling themselves on this one because the number of Chambers fish that are in the system as it is. And even less of these will be harvested if Snider is nuked and effort goes down in the timeframe where at least some of these Chambers fish are in the system. One of those things that looks great on paper ... but who else is going to get those fish out of the river at that time???

And there is reference in the summary of the Araki data ... the first one that so many of the naysayers of the program point at as the program's biggest flaw is the decreased productivity of firs-gen broodstocked fish. But more importantly to me to the later data that the naysayers don't seem to know about ... that shows that once these broodstocked fish spawn with wild fish again, that the amount of productivity lost diminishes.

And that is perhaps why this program seems to be working where so many haven't, because we're working with a smaller percentage of the population and the fish are interacting down the road with a big enough percentage of wild fish to keep this issue at bay.